"Object Lessons: American Still-Life Painting in the Nineteenth Century."

The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State

Martin Johnson Heade, "The White Rose," c. 1874–80, oil on artist’s board, 11 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches. Promised gift of Barbara Palmer. Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State

"Object Lessons: American Still-Life Painting in the Nineteenth Century" opens Sept. 4 in the first-floor special exhibitions gallery. The show highlights the rich tradition of still-life painting in the United States with an emphasis on Pennsylvania’s influential role in that history. The 22 works featured in "Object Lessons" explore a variety of themes – from the brevity of life, to the bounty of the continent, to the poetic power and meaning of the commonplace. Rarely seen loans from private collectors complement the holdings of the Palmer to explore how flowers, fruit and simple household items have transfixed and beguiled viewers from the nineteenth century to the present day.

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  Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
  
  

  Image: Richard La Barre Goodwin / Collection of the Palmer Museum of Art, 2011.104, Gift of Alvin and Jean Snowiss
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  Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
  Collection of the Palmer Museum of Art, 2011.104, Gift of Alvin and Jean Snowiss
  

“The Palmer is committed to presenting exhibitions that explore different periods and styles in American art,” said Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art. “This exhibition places masterworks from the collection in dialogue with loans from private hands to better understand the development and cultural significance of still-life painting in the 19th century, when the genre was at its height of popularity.”

Pennsylvania artists were at the forefront of the still-life genre, and the exhibition features works by a number of painters local to or identified with the Commonwealth, notably William Michael Harnett, Albert F. King, Rubens Peale, John Frederick Peto and Severin Roesen. "Object Lessons" also includes a varied roster of important artists who gravitated toward depicting inanimate objects amid the rising commodity culture and cosmopolitan networks of the Gilded Age, among them William Mason Brown, William Merritt Chase, Charles Caryl Coleman, Martin Johnson Heade and Elihu Vedder.

“The exhibition not only brings together a distinguished group of artists who excelled at still-life painting, but it is also an opportunity to consider premier, though seldom exhibited, examples by them,” said Adam Thomas, curator of American art at the Palmer.